//------------------------------// // Best of Both Worlds // Story: The Slow Transformation of Oliver Sanderson // by libertydude //------------------------------// I spent the morning trying not to stare at Summer Breeze. Not out of worry about her committing some skullduggery, but because I’d drawn the short straw on bedroom choices. Summer had taken up residence in the guest bedroom I usually occupied, and Dad flouted his superiority as “the Parent” to grab the remaining room. So I found myself on the living room foldout couch, staring above the television at some Scandanavian painting that used paint blotches to represent people, all varying colors and dotted along a rocky landscape. I didn’t wake up until late in the morning. Back home, I would be lucky to even get seven hours of sleep a night, an unfortunate result of combining early morning starts and late night touch-ups on my private Picassos. But here I slept all the way to nine, stirring only when the faint clattering and shuffling from the kitchen became unignorable. The foldout creaked when I sat up, and Summer’s head shot out from the kitchen doorway. “Good morning,” she said. Her trademark cheer filled her voice, but it seemed restrained. Maybe Nell whispered to her about my disposition, or she actually had enough smarts to recognize she needed to tread carefully around me. “Morning,” I said. I pulled my Golden Knights T-Shirt and black jeans out from my bag, bedecked in only boxers and walking slowly despite the alien peeking out at me every few seconds. I suppose I should have felt uneasy, but months of wandering around naked ponies at university and Summer’s own relaxed clothing policy assured me she wouldn’t be put off. In fact, she probably wanted to see me. I hoped she took a peek right then, the bright yellow shirt still hanging over my head and my bare chest visible. Not to see her face turn red in embarrassment or provoke some deeply repressed lust or any melodramatic crap. Just a flagrant hosting of the thing she wanted: humanity in any form. Broad chests, bare skin, mammalian bodies. Something as alien to them as they were to us, only to disappear once when their interest peaked. Look, little horsie, I thought, the jeans stretching over my legs and covering once-exposed flesh. You’ll only see something like this for a few more days. Don’t get attached to it. Strange, how sketches and naked parading were the only revenges I could enact in our dying days. For now though, it was enough. Just more minor victories in a lost war. If Summer had seen see my display, she didn’t indicate so over breakfast. She just sat there, a thin smile always threatening to burst wider any moment. I knew it could not be the breakfast itself, consisting of sausages and bacon hash browns. She stuck to the celery from yesterday, along with a bowl of oats. The only moments her smile faltered came with each new bite, her eyes looking across at these strange foods she couldn’t eat. I’ll admit, I felt a little bad for her. Emphasis on little. I still ate the food, chewing as slow as possible and shooting the occasional contemptuous glance her way. I waited for a flash of disgust or wonderment, some sign she would falter and rage at me for taunting her. To know she wouldn’t be this pleasant automaton, a statue carved into eternal happiness by foreign values and all-powerful beings. But she just kept smiling. The rest of the day consisted of the drudgery I had expected. Nell and Dad sat around, talking about far-flung relatives and glancing at black-and-white photographs from their childhood home back in Manitou Springs. Summer egged them on, her head nodding with each detail and interrupting whenever some human term came up. “What’s a Cadillac?” she asked when I inched my way back to the living room. The stories themselves were etched in my memory, Dad’s consistent remembrances taking over many a weekend. But familiarity breeds boredom, so I sat on the couch and opened my laptop. Before I left Florida, I’d submitted select drawings to various art magazines. This was another reason for my thesis’s sluggish progress, as the time polishing the submissions had taken up the experimentation time I might’ve gotten. But money and exposure are the primary desires for any artist, and anybody who could give me both before my crippling was worth the time. My e-mail sat cluttered with new junk mail and reminders from the few social media sites I frequented. Facebook and Twitter announced they would be going down in two days, when “electrical interference” crossed their server sites in Silicon Valley. Another from the National Weather Service announced the Wave was halfway across the Pacific, keeping at a steady fifty miles-per-hour and expected to hit the West Coast in two and a half days. But nothing appeared from Farthem Heights, Trail Blaze, or any other submission site. Of course. Like any great Hitchcock picture, the suspense would stretch as far as it could before I snapped. After I erased my junk mail, I became distinctly aware of green eyes looking at me from the dining room. I turned my head, and Summer’s legs shifted on the mahogany carpet. Her body tensed, like she was ready to bolt any second. “Hey,” she said. “Hey,” I said. “That’s an interesting device,” she said, walking towards the couch with a hesitant step. She stared at the laptop screen, still glowing with received e-mails and ads for malware detection. “Yes, it is.” I turned the screen toward her, not to be friendly but to prevent her from leaning over my shoulder. “I hope these will still work after the Conversion. I’ve heard about how useful they are.” I nodded. “Be a shame to lose this one. I’ve done quite a bit of work on it.” “Like what?” I gave a small shrug. “Writing, messaging, watching videos. The usual things, I guess.” She looked down at the ground and kicked at the floor, her hooves still bedecked in the pink slippers. “Sounds nice. We don’t use them much.” “Keyboards not big enough?” She shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Princess Twilight and the others talked about teaching us, but they never got around to it. I think it’s because they were worried we’d get…” She looked away in embarrassment. “Sorry. It’s rude of me to say.” I held back a laugh. Her species wiping out ours, and she’s worried about offending us. My tightlipped conversation technique gave way to nibbling curiosity. “I have thick skin,” I said. Summer smiled a little, then said: “They didn’t want us becoming… oh, what was the word? Hooked on computers.” “A surprisingly perceptive critique. Many health organizations warn about computer addiction.” “That, and I think the Princesses just weren’t sure Earth would be able to hold onto your technology once the Wave comes. Everywhere else that’s been hit hasn’t been able to restart their electronics yet.” I pursed my lips. “Must be a bitch to have a pacemaker.” “Pacemaker?” “Device that makes your heart beat on time. Some people have hearts that are a little out of sync.” “Oh dear. Well, I heard the Conversion was healing lots of people. Maybe it heals their bad hearts when they convert.” I nodded, more out of acknowledgement than agreement. How the Conversion worked and its physiological effects upon humans was a mystery to me. I’d assumed it was like those transformations in anime: a shooting pain, a quick burst of energy, then viola! The new you standing where the old once tread. Uncle Sam must’ve known something more though, given he spent the last six months commanding folks with heart conditions to go to a hospital when the Conversion came through. “Hope for the best, plan for the worst,” I said. “Is that a human saying?” Summer asked. “For now. In a few days, I guess it’ll be a pony saying as well.” “Not bad advice.” Her smile fell somewhat, and she stared out into the still-soaked city streets. “Maybe we would’ve been better off had we planned for the worst.” With that, she wandered back to the dining room and the competing voices debating which cousin pranked Uncle Jeb back in 1957. I looked back to my screen, now on life-save mode and empty. What was now a man stared back at me from the dark reflector.